1. Technical Field
The present invention refers to the field of broad spectrum light generation, in a spectral field from blue to near infra-red.
It more particularly refers to a system for generating polychromatic light, including:                an optical pumping means suitable for continuously or quasi-continuously emitting a monochromatic or quasi-monochromatic radiation according to a pumping wavelength,        a light guiding means arranged such as to emit polychromatic radiation continuously or quasi-continuously at the output thereof, and        means for coupling between the pumping and guiding means.        
It also refers to various uses of such a system for generating polychromatic light.
2. Background Art
It is known from the prior art to typically generate a white light using an incandescent lamp. Nevertheless, this type of source has the disadvantage of providing a light of which power (or illumination) and space coherence are significantly weak.
A general problem in the field in question thus relates to the generation of high power and high spatial coherence polychromatic light.
In another known solution, a supercontinuum source pumped by a pulsed laser is used.
In this respect, patent document FR 2867574 describes for example a device for generating polychromatic light, including optical pumping means for emitting a radiation of at least two different excitation wavelengths, as well as light guiding means arranged, in case of a nonlinear excitation by the radiation, to emit polychromatic light on an output thereof. To this end, the guiding means comprise a non-linear medium, which allows the set-up of several frequency conversions. The optical pumping means comprise a laser cavity emitting at least two different wavelengths. The guiding means thus allow a large extension of the spectrum of the light oscillating in the laser cavity.
Patent document FR 2884623 describes a device for generating polychromatic light, further comprising optical pumping means, light guiding means and selective injection means. The pumping means are suitable to emit a first radiation of a first wavelength. The selective injection means make it possible to inject the first radiation emitted from the pumping means in the guiding means, the latter being arranged to generate a harmonic corresponding to the selective injection and to output polychromatic light, by means of a non-linear excitation from this first radiation and this harmonic. To this end, the guiding means may include a microstructured optical fiber and be substantially of monomode type for the first radiation and substantially of multimode type for the harmonic.
However, owing to the use of pulsed lasers, this type of source can provide only packets of white light at the guiding means output, which limits the output luminous power. Moreover, since it is a matter of using such a source in combination with other measuring equipment for detection or measurement applications, the pulse generation requires the synchronization of this source with the other apparatuses, which makes the resulting system complicated.
Such sources were the object matter of other publications, for example:    “Visible CW-pumped supercontinuum” (A. Kudlinski and al.; Optics Letters; Oct. 15, 2008; Vol. 33, No 20, pp. 2407-2409),    “Microstructured fibers with highly nonlinear materials” (K. Schuster and al.; Opt Quant Electron; Dec. 12, 2007; pp. 1057-1069),    “Visible continuum generation in air-silica microstructure optical fibers with anomalous dispersion at 800 nm” (Jinendra and al.; Optics Letters; No 25; 2000; pp. 25-27), and    “White-light supercontinuum generation with 60-ps pump pulses in a photonic crystal fiber” (S. Coen and al.; Optics Letters; No 26; 2001; pp. 1356-1358).
Thus, the related art provides no solution which makes it possible to have a high spatial coherence and high power polychromatic light source covering all the field of visible light, while being implementable in a simple manner with currently available apparatuses and without synchronization.